Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal

by James D. Hornfischer

  Five brothers serving on the same ship seemed like an awful idea to Hagen. With all the finesse of a twenty-two-year-old who was quite sure of his judgment, he sent the Sullivans away, saying he couldn’t help them. “I didn’t think much of it,” Hagen said, “but a couple of days later my boss came up with smoke coming out of both ears.” The commander told Hagen that the Navy’s well-publicized promise would be honored. All branches of the service were hungry for recruits. The Sullivan boys held all the cards.

  “Well, this doesn’t make very good sense to me,” Hagen said. The commander turned on his uppity ensign and said, “Hagen, do what you are told to do in the Navy. You are twenty-two years old and you don’t have to think.”

  The Sullivans were mediocre students, standing apart in Iowa’s Protestant cornrows largely by virtue of their Catholicism. But with their wicked talent for pranks and an untroubled outlook that seemed out of step with the Depression that had limited their prospects, they were more at home at the pool hall than in catechism. At home they were toughs, sons of a hard-pressed Irish railroad worker. They kept the east side of Waterloo “straight and clean,” said one resident. “Police didn’t go in our area much, but the boys took care of everything.” Their impulse to enforce justice had been triggered anew by the attack on Hawaii. The Japanese had killed one of their own there: a kid named Bill Ball from Fredericksburg, just forty miles up U.S. 63. Every family had its Bill Ball, a personal loss inflicted by an alien enemy an ocean away. The Sullivans resolved to deal with the Japanese like they had their rival thugs on Adams Street. “I guess our minds are made up, aren’t they fellows?” the oldest brother, George, said. “And when we go in, we want to go in together. If the worst comes to worst, why we’ll all have gone down together.”

  At Pier Two in the New York Navy Yard, they found their new home, the USS Juneau. She was a sleek light cruiser of the new Atlanta class, lightly armored but fitted with a formidable array of antiaircraft guns. The first four Atlantas would all fight in the Solomons. At the commissioning, the Sullivans were celebrities, posing for the wire services in buttoned-up peacoats and flat caps. On liberty at Jack Dempsey’s lounge on Broadway, they were photographed with the heavyweight champ. The Juneau’s captain, Lyman Knute Swenson, was ambivalent about the publicity, the benefits of which were fleeting and dwarfed by the risk of a concentrated tragedy. But celebrity was an intoxicant, for the brothers and the armed service alike.

  Departing the Navy yard, the camouflage-dappled Juneau steamed around the Battery and headed up the Hudson River for the Iona Island ammunition depot, where she would load her magazines for battles unknown.

  BOB HAGEN’S OWN first shipboard assignment after his tour at Great Lakes was over was the Aaron Ward, a new destroyer headed to the Pacific. Commander Orville F. Gregor was reputed to be the dictatorial type. Hagen’s new duties as assistant communications officer included filling a new job that few officers, not even the Aaron Ward’s captain, yet understood—the job of radar officer.

  The idea of aiming a pulse of radio energy at a target and measuring its range and compass bearing by the nature of the echo had the potential to revolutionize the ancient art of ships putting ordnance on target. Radar, or “radio detection and ranging,” was first put into practice by the Royal Navy. The technology came to the United States eventually through the Naval Research Laboratory and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in partnership with engineers in private industry, Bell Labs and RCA earliest among them. Two opposite misconceptions impeded its introduction. The fleet’s Luddites clung to the idea that because radar had not figured in World War I’s Battle of Jutland, which was the textbook case study at the Naval Academy and the war colleges, it must not be terribly important. Against them railed evangelists who believed radar was, as a historian of the technology put it, a “magic box on which one need only press the button and the battle was won.”

  The first officers to be selected for MIT’s fire-control course had helped design the technology for naval use and knew its potentials and limitations. Alfred G. Ward, who would join the battleship North Carolina, had helped develop electric-powered, servo-controlled guns. Lloyd Mustin, the debate opponent to Lewis “Chesty” Puller and range instructor to Joseph Wylie, had conceived of gyro-stabilized antiaircraft guns. As a graduate student in MIT’s electrical engineering program, he and Lieutenant Commander Rivero of the San Juan helped develop the computer that calculated how far an antiaircraft gunner had to lead his target to hit it. As the assistant gunnery officer on the Atlanta, Mustin would have ample time to refine his theories. As the first radar officer at the Bureau of Ordnance, Rivero had the job of routing new radar sets from the factory to whichever ship was on hand, in port for overhaul or repair, to receive it.

  Installing technology was one thing. Encouraging warriors to discover a second-nature knack for using it was another. The Navy was slow to move beyond the period of high secrecy that surrounded the research. “There wasn’t any real training program,” Rivero said. “That’s one mistake we made. We didn’t think that far ahead.”

  In 1942, the attitudes of most line officers toward this fledgling technology spanned the full range of know-nothingdom, from raw ignorance to well-considered dismissal. Hanson Baldwin regarded the typical naval officer of the day as “a narrow man, with fixed and unassailable ideas of politics, life, and society; too often—though master of the details—he cannot see the woods because of the trees.” The problem ran straight to the top. “Our flag officers and senior captains are old compared with those of other navies; far too many of them suffer from nervous or heart disabilities; to stand the great strain of heavy responsibilities they should quite clearly be ten years younger.” As Kelly Turner admitted, “Neither I nor any of my staff knew anything about radar, except by reputation.” By the time the technology reached the fleet, a more capable version, the SG or “Sugar George” microwave surface-search radar, was already making it obsolete and ensuring the continued puzzlement of officers responsible for tactical action. The SG’s shorter wavelength—10 centimeters as opposed to 150 in the SC search set—gave it better resolution. Coupled with a motorized rotating receiver and a new cathode display known as a Plan Position Indicator (PPI), it generated a more visually intuitive, 360-degree overhead view centered on the transmitting ship. But technology advanced much faster than training or tactical doctrine did.

  The officers in Bob Hagen’s ship, the Aaron Ward, were slowly learning the foibles of the strange new piece of equipment in their chart room. The destroyer’s SC radar required its operator to point the antenna manually by turning a hand wheel. Its “A scope” displayed any contacts located on that particular bearing as spikes on an x–y axis, where x denoted range and y the strength of the signal and hence the size of the object. If there were many targets to track, the radar officer would be a busy man, slewing the transmitter back and forth to acquire them and plotting the data by hand. When the machinery failed, it required an inordinate amount of time for radiomen and electricians to put it back in order. In one respect it outperformed hopes: Because the boxy receiver-indicator console drew a lot of power and accumulated its heat, it offered a handy surface on which to keep a coffeepot warm.

  Untroubled with new technology to master, the Japanese had refined the task of optical target spotting to lethal effect. After Mikawa’s masterly performance in the Battle of Savo Island, Admiral King’s staff could do little else but marvel: “It is to be hoped that we will profit by their example and in the future turn against them the lessons they have so ably taught us.”

  Admiral King saw the need to relearn his trade from the ground up. He understood that in the art of war, amateurs talk tactics but professionals talk logistics. Ernest King was a professional. “The war has been variously termed a war of production and a war of machines,” he wrote. “Whatever else it is, so far as the United States is concerned, it is a war of logistics. The ways and means to supply and support our forces in all parts of the
world—including the Army of course—have presented problems nothing short of colossal and have required the most careful and intricate planning. The profound effect of logistics on our strategic decisions are not likely to have full significance to those who do not have to traverse the tremendous distances in the Pacific. It is no easy matter in a global war to have the right materials in the right places at the right times in the right quantities.”

  The path from Nouméa northward into the southern Solomons had an important waypoint in the New Hebrides, at the base of Espiritu Santo, about 625 miles south of Guadalcanal. On August 10, Ghormley designated it as a strongpoint for the support and reinforcement effort. Espiritu Santo, even less developed than Nouméa, offered plenty of space for expansion: wharves, cargo piers, airstrips, and anything else the 6th and 7th construction battalions would find the means to build. Rear Admiral McCain immediately saw its value as an airfield site; he directed the construction and ordered a five-thousand-foot runway cut ino the coconut plantation and jungle. Ghormley rerouted to Espiritu all of the equipment—a tug, two barges, a pontoon wharf, and ship-mooring buoys—once earmarked for the occupation of Santa Cruz, an original objective of Task One that was canceled in favor of landings on Guadalcanal. He directed construction of a large wharf with a timber crib sturdy enough to support a heavy crane, several piers for the rapid handling of light cargo, and a second channel nearer the airfield. The focal point of the entire logistical apparatus, of course, was the island that was the newest and most hazard-ridden property of the U.S. Marine Corps.

  On August 12, a McCain staffer landed on Guadalcanal in a PBY Catalina patrol plane, went ashore for an inspection, and declared the unimproved twenty-six-hundred-foot airstrip on a broad grassy savanna fit to receive fighter aircraft. Later that day, the airfield was named in honor of the well-loved commander of a Marine bombing squadron, Major Lofton R. Henderson, shot down and killed while attacking the carrier Hiryu on June 4, the decisive day off Midway. Without carrier aircraft to cover them, and with the airdrome at Espiritu Santo still just “a gleam in Ghormley’s eye,” the men on Guadalcanal would have to establish their very own air corps to defend themselves. It would soon be known as “the Cactus Air Force.”

  Marine engineers co-opted steamrollers, tractors, and other abandoned Japanese assets to make the airfield serviceable for heavier strike aircraft such as Dauntless dive-bombers and Avenger torpedo bombers. Caches of ordnance and ammunition were buried along the perimeter of the strip. The violently variable weather made it difficult to operate. “It was dry and would raise a cloud of dust that you could see a mile,” Ernest M. Eller, one of Admiral Nimitz’s staffers, said. “It would block out any other plane coming along. An hour later it would rain, and you would sliver in just as if you were in a mud hole. Then the hot sun would dry the field within another hour or two.” As often as not in the early days, pilots would have to contend with Japanese sniper fire as they taxied or made their approach.

  They were bitter about the Navy’s abandonment of them, and would tell stories ever afterward about how they persisted despite it. Well within extended range of the Japanese base at Rabaul, the marines had to contend daily with raids by Japanese bombers. The harassment did not end, not by day or by night. Japanese mortarmen and the odd artillery piece, too, worked long hours making their lives miserable. The small contingent of Japanese on Guadalcanal had fled to the hills when the Americans landed. They would serve mainly as a harassing force while awaiting reinforcements from Rabaul.

  The pattern of fighting through June 1942 had suggested that carriers would play the deciding role in the naval war against Japan. What kind of fight this South Seas campaign would become remained an open question. Carriers would be important, but after the Battle of Savo Island it was clear that the “gun club” didn’t need disbanding yet. Admiral Ghormley knew in his bones the power of the battleships. His career was rooted in the big-gun fleet. He had served in the Nevada, the Oklahoma, in a prominent staff job in the Battle Force, and then in the Nevada again as her commander.

  The fight that was taking shape in the southern Solomons was going to be neither a single, climactic World War I–style daylight slugfest nor a repeat of Midway, a dance of search planes and long-range naval air strikes. The South Pacific Forces would draw strength from a foundation of supply and reinforcement built far south of the point of contact with the enemy. And the point of the spear that dueled with the enemy would be the surface fleet—destroyers, cruisers, and battleships, aided by aircraft, whose job would be to seize control of the seaways from the enemy. Neither the Navy nor the Marines had fought a war like this before. Its finer points would be developed, tested, and adjusted on the fly over time.

  On August 12, Captain Samuel Jenkins, skipper of the Atlanta, called together his officers and shared the story of what had happened four nights before, of how in the fog-swaddled night near Savo Island, flares, then searchlights, then plunging fire left a powerful squadron of U.S. heavy cruisers burning and helpless. As the Atlanta made circles with the carriers north of Nouméa, the inactivity bothered those who felt the ache for revenge. The fight for Guadalcanal had only begun. At least one report reached SOPAC suggesting that as many as forty Japanese destroyers were based at Rabaul. “There is going to be a bitch of a night session up here, some dark night, with torpedoes in the water as thick as flies,” Lloyd Mustin confided to his diary.

  It was intolerable to battle-minded men that the aircraft carrier task force that was ostensibly covering the landing force and its escorts should forgo a sunrise counterattack on Mikawa on August 9. With more tempting targets available to the Japanese—transports and cargomen vulnerably shuttling between the Solomons and Nouméa—Mustin considered the idea “completely fantastic” that Japanese planes would be able to fly all the way down from Rabaul for a long-shot strike against carriers that were well defended and seldom precisely located. He didn’t think much of the fighting spirit of his superiors. “They’re so goddamned scared their lousy carriers will get hurt that the whole effective Pacific Fleet hauls ass at the mention of a few Jap planes,” Mustin wrote. “We have no high commanders capable of playing ball in the same league with many of the Japs,” he continued. “I wish to God Wild Bill Halsey were back here to put a little fire, drive, and action into things.”

  The Enterprise, Saratoga, and Wasp, each of them irreplaceable in the near term, spent several days cruising the Coral Sea, four hundred miles southeast of the Solomons, taking turns drinking from the oilers Platte and Kaskaskia. Their screen, including the Atlanta, stayed faithfully by in their defense.

  Wags in the Royal Navy were said to joke that if they ever came to blows with their cousins on the other side of the Atlantic, “all their fleet would have to do to insure victory would be to remain safely at ease in port for six weeks; at the end of that time they could sally forth to find an American Navy exhausted by its own frenetic maneuverings.” The frenetic idling was never greater than in the early days off Guadalcanal. As Admiral Ghormley occupied himself with the puzzle of supplying Vandegrift’s men, and as the carriers burned fuel and refueled north of Nouméa, a week passed then another without further appearances by the Imperial Japanese Navy.

  Finding planes to send to Henderson Field had been no easy thing given the jealous way Fletcher’s carriers and Ghormley’s island bases husbanded their aircraft, but on August 20, word spread through General Vandegrift’s perimeter that air reinforcements were finally on the way. Nimitz directed their deployment to the South Pacific as soon as the pilots designated to fly them finished their training. Ferried from Fiji by the escort carrier Long Island, two squadrons of Marine Corps pilots made a short two-hundred-mile hop to the island and landed amid cheers. Fresh from flight school and with scarcely a carrier landing among them, they included nineteen F4F Wildcats under Captain John L. Smith (Marine Fighting Squadron 223), and a dozen SBD Dauntlesses under Major Richard C. Mangrum (Marine Bombing Squadron 232).

  Marines
driving jeeps raced the planes down the runway as they arrived. “Our planes had come at last!—only thirty-one, but in that joyful moment they seemed to darken the sky,” a photographer, Thayer Soule, wrote. General Vandegrift, a reserved, even-tempered southern gentleman, was giddy. The arrival of the planes rated as “one of the most beautiful sights of my life.” With tears welling in his eyes, Vandegrift greeted Mangrum as he climbed down from the cockpit of his Dauntless, saying, “Thank God you have come.”

  “That night we went to bed early and slept well,” Soule wrote. “The fleet that had sailed away so long ago had not forgotten us after all.” The preceding two weeks had seemed long indeed. The coming twenty-four hours would be longer still. For the Japanese chose that moment, the night after the pilots landed, to make their first concentrated stab at evicting the defenders of Henderson Field.

  10

  The Tokyo Express

  CABLING JOSEPH STALIN TO APOLOGIZE FOR MISSING A CONFERENCE in Moscow, President Roosevelt acknowledged the urgency of the Eastern Front and declared, as politics seemed to require, that “our real enemy is Germany.” As Soviets reeled before the assaults of the Wehrmacht, and the transatlantic convoys meant to save them withered under U-boat attack, FDR made the case for hope in the Pacific. “We have gained, I believe, a toe-hold in the Southwest Pacific from which the Japanese will find it very difficult to dislodge us.” The Japanese Army’s first concentrated attempt to do so began taking shape on the night of August 19, when a detachment of shock troops under Colonel Kiyonao Ichiki snuck ashore some fifteen miles east of Henderson Field.